PEACE AND GOOD-WILL

“How cross he looks!” said the DominÉ, benignly, dangling his grandson on one awkward knee. “I believe he disapproves of existence. Do you know, children, it has struck me from the first, I can’t understand why your son should have been born with such a look of chronic discontent. What do you mean, Ottochen?” He shook the morsel of pink-spotted apathy, and laughed innocently at its unconscious sneer.

Involuntarily the parents’ eyes met. Otto walked to the window.

“Life is good, Ottochen,” continued the DominÉ, his eagle face alight with tenderness. “Life is very beautiful. People love each other, and the love falls like a rainbow across every background of cloud. Everything is beautiful, especially the storms.” The baby puckered up its face into one of those sudden, apparently causeless fretfulnesses which the masculine mind resents. “Thou wilt grow up,” said its grandfather, “into a brave soldier of the Cross”—the Baby overflowed in slobbery, but agonizing, sorrow. Ursula hastily took it from the DominÉ’s clumsy deprecations.

“It is strange,” protested the DominÉ, “that we weep most without a reason. When the reason comes we often forget to weep.”

This time the elder Otto’s eyes remained resolutely fixed on the snow-girt landscape.

“He was frightened,” explained the young mother, reproachfully, as she hushed her screaming charge.

“Frightened! Ah, just so!” The DominÉ rose, a warm flush on his face. “That is the cause of most of our sorrow. Frightened! If men were less afraid of trouble, they would see how little there is of it. Good-bye, children, I am going back to Aunt Josine.” And the DominÉ marched off, his armless sleeve swinging limp beside his elastic figure.

Otto turned round into the darkened room. It was true the whole atmosphere of the house had long been one of latent worry. He rested his hand silently on Ursula’s shoulder, and a great feeling of assuagement spread over both their hearts. The Baby’s shrieks were dying down into an exhausted gurgle. Both parents gazed deeply at the child.

“Ursula,” said the Baron, presently, “if you feel strong enough, I should like to have one or two people here for Christmas. I should like to invite the Van Helmonts who were so kind to me during my period of hard work at Bois-le-Duc. Theodore van Helmont and his mother. They are our only relations of the name. And I think they have been kept too much out of the family.”

“Are they really the only other Van Helmonts besides us?” questioned Ursula.

“Yes,” he answered, recoiling hastily, as she had done, from the proximity of his brother’s name; “but there is a brand-new Van Helmont now—the heir!” He placed a soft finger against little Otto’s bulgy cheek.

“True. How funny! Do you know, I had never thought of it.” She colored. “I never think,” she added, “of what is so far away as that.” She rose and kissed her husband, and held up the child to him.

“Otto,” she added, “supposing—if—if there had been no baby, and”—she stopped.

“The Horst would have been sold by auction,” he burst in, violently, “two months after my death. Do you think I have ever lost sight of that? All through this anxious year, Ursula, the thought has never let me rest.”

The words frightened her. Could anything have brought home more clearly the separation of their lives?

“Theodore van Helmont is a good fellow,” Otto went on, “hard-working and honest. I thoroughly respect him. I should like you to know him. But he isn’t much to look at.”

“Why have they never been here before? I don’t remember hearing of them till you went to Bois-le-Duc.”

“Well, as I tell you, young Theodore isn’t much to look at. And my father greatly objected to his cousin’s marriage at the time; he never would see him after.”

“Whom did he marry?” asked Ursula, looking down into the cradle and readjusting its coverlet. “I mean—what?”

“She was a farmer’s daughter from the other side of Drum. He picked her up when staying here, some thirty years ago. I remember it quite well. My father was furiously angry.”

“And he never forgave the son,” mused Ursula, with one finger in her little Otto’s clammy clasp. “Not even the son. I thought people always forgave the son.”

“I assure you she is quite a nice, motherly person, and so unpretentious. That is what I like in her. It will be a pleasure to have her here, if only mamma consents to put up with her presence. Poor woman, she told me she had never even visited her own relations. I suppose she didn’t dare.”

“Her own relations,” repeated Ursula. “Isn’t that a difficulty?”

“I don’t see why, if people would only take things simply! She can go to them from here. No one believes more firmly than I do in true nobility, but it is not dependent on surroundings.”

She smiled up at him; “Ah, Otto, you say that on account of—me?”

But the suggestion annoyed him with the pain of its voluntary abasement. “The two cases have nothing in common,” he said, almost angrily. “If there is a possibility that you or any one else might draw absurd comparisons, I had better give up the idea at once.”

“No, no. I shall be glad to have them. Baby must learn to know and be good to all his relations.”

“Next year might do for that. But, Ursula, talking of Baby’s relations, we might ask your Uncle Mopius and his wife.”

“I consider Harriet has behaved disgracefully”—began Ursula.

“Just so; and your uncle enjoys the idea of our being angry about the money. That’s why I want to ask him,” he added, proudly.

“Then, Otto, if it is to be a family reunion, should we not”—her voice dropped to a whisper; she fingered a button of his waistcoat—“ask Gerard too?”

“Yes, we will ask Gerard,” he answered, hurriedly, annoyed that she should utter what he had been making up his mind to say. And then he left the room without another word.

Ursula smiled to herself, and immediately began to apostrophize the helpless infant: “And we will have a Christmas-tree, Baby,” she said, “and a lot of beautiful lights, Baby. And warm socks and shoes for the babies that haven’t got any, Baby. And you shall give blankets and coals to all the old women, Baby.”

But even this appalling prospect did not move little Otto. He lay staring steadily, and that constant frown, which his grandfather said he had been born with, wrinkled the raw beef-steak of his unfinished little face.

Meanwhile Otto had gone to tell his mother of the coming festivities. The old Baroness did not seem to pay much attention, immersed as she was in a sort of memoir which she had been recently concocting to the glorification of her departed lord.

“What did you say young Helmont’s name was?” she asked, suddenly, peering over her heavy gold eye-glasses.

“A family name, mamma—Theodore.”

“It is an insult,” said the Dowager, and her gaze once more fell on the page in front of her.

A fortnight later the various guests had all arrived; the DominÉ greatly approved of their coming. “Let others less favored share your happiness,” he said to his daughter. The good DominÉ, while constantly eloquent of the battles of life, rejoiced at the peace which he dreamed round about him. Yet he still had “Tante Josine.” The light of his life had flitted away to the Manor-house.

Nobody could see Theodore van Helmont and contest the accuracy of Otto’s statement that the young post-office clerk wasn’t much to look at. One thing showed very plainly, and that was his peasant blood. But he made no attempt to hide it; he had a quiet and unassuming manner, like his lumbersome mother, and would hardly have attracted attention but for his peach-like coloring, which made him almost an Albino. He was awkward in the unaccustomed vicinity of ladies, and spoke little, dropping away into the shade, unless somebody touched on his hobby. This no one ever did, except indirectly, for that hobby was “social science,” a number of “ologies” unconnected with life. His mother often wondered that so good a man could also be so clever; her own philosophy was of the simplest, all condensed into one unconscious rule: never to remember an injury, while never letting slip an opportunity of doing a kindness. Her only attitude towards the old Baroness van Helmont was one of respectful sympathy. Of Tante Louisa she felt afraid, for Tante Louisa had asked her, on the evening of her arrival, whether she believed in woman suffrage, and she had not known what “suffrage” was. The Freule Louisa, it need hardly be noted, believed in no suffrage at all. “If only we could stop the million asses’ braying,” she was wont to remark, “perhaps we should hear the lion’s voice at last.” This remark was not her own. She had got it out of the Victory.

The quiet clerk, dull, with comparative content, over a merciful volume of engravings, had pricked up his ears when he heard the Freule start “a sensible subject.” It was small talk that did for him, reducing his brain to chaos. “The principle of government by majority,” he said, “being once universally accepted, there appears to be no logical reason for leaving that majority incomplete.”

“Government by majority is a pleonasm,” said the Freule, tatting away. She meant “an anachronism,” whatever she may have meant by that. The young man hastily returned to his engravings.

“The majority is always wrong,” interposed the Dowager Baroness, very decidedly, “and, therefore, the larger it is the more wrong it must be.” She had remained in the drawing-room chiefly from disgusted curiosity, and now sat listless, her delicate face like a sea-shell among her heavy weeds.

“But, Mevrouw,” began Theodore again, from a sense of duty.

“Hush, it is certainly so, young man; besides, my husband always said it was. I am so sorry to see a Van Helmont a Radical.” Her face flushed impatiently, and, in the awkward silence, Ursula said it was a beautiful starlit night.

“The stars are so pleasant in winter-time, are they not?” remarked Theodore’s mother, whose fat hands lay foolishly in her substantial lap; but the Freule van Borck was not going to stand such sentiments as these.

“Oh yes,” she said, briskly; “Ursula always notices the weather. Some people do, and never talk of anything else. I wish you would tell me, Mynheer van Helmont—we were discussing the subject the other day—would you rather do wrong that right may ensue, or right for the sake of wrong?” The Freule was very fond of propounding these problems of the “Does-your-mother-like-cheese?” order. Some spinster ladies “affection” them just as their spinster aunts used to propose Bouts RimÉs.

“You must leave me a few moments to consider my answer,” replied Theodore, gravely.

This was quite a new experience for the Freule, and hugely delighted her.

“A very sensible young man,” she thought. “And you, Gerard?” she asked, turning to her nephew meanwhile.

Gerard had arrived at the Manor-house the day before; it was just about a year since he had last slept in the house, and his mother’s heart yearned over him.

“I should do what I liked best,” said Gerard, promptly, always pleased to exasperate his aunt.

“Gerard, you have no principle. What does your cousin conclude?”

“Right and wrong, as we refer to them, are such very vague terms, Freule,” responded the young clerk, thoughtfully. “But, supposing the words to be used in their absolute sense”—the Freule nodded—“I should do the immediate right.”

“Bravo,” said Otto’s deep voice from a distant sofa. “And now, Ursula, will you give us some music?”

“Oh yes, music,” assented Theodore’s mother. “I love music. The loveliest organ comes past our house on Fridays. I quite long for Fridays to come round.”

The last sentence was addressed to the Dowager, who smiled graciously, for she was watching Gerard.

“My daughter-in-law plays a very great deal,” said the Dowager.

But the evening was long. Every one hoped for diversion from the Mopiuses, who were expected on the morrow, and a general yawn of relief hung heavy round the bedroom candles.

“Theodore Helmont is straight right down to the bottom,” Otto said to his wife as soon as they were alone. “You see how earnest he is, and how wise. If ever you stand in need of a counsellor, Ursula, I hope you will turn to Theodore. He is one of the few men on whom I could fully rely.”

“You are my counsellor,” replied Ursula, wishing the words were more widely true.